If you haven't added a Graphics Collection to your personal Accordance Library or taken advantage of our Custom Upgrades to a larger Graphics Collection, here are 7 reasons to reconsider.

Custom Upgrades. Accordance comes with four levels of Graphics Collections: Learner, Discoverer, Pro, and Master. Once you have any level in your personal Accordance Library, you never have to pay full price to go to a higher level. Custom Upgrades take into account titles you already have, so you never pay for the same title twice!

Use in Teaching and Preaching Settings. Did you know that your purchase of any Graphics Collection entitles you to use images in teaching and preaching settings? Illustrate your lesson or sermon with any of the thousands of photos available in Accordance Graphics Collections.

PhotoGuide. Who knew when we first released the Accordance Bible Land PhotoGuide, it would eventually mushroom into six volumes covering Egypt, Europe, Israel, the Near East, Turkey as well as an Overview? The PhotoGuide Overview comes with the Graphics Learner and includes links to more details and photos in all the other guides. Get the Graphics Pro or Master to obtain all six of the PhotoGuides!

Customizable Atlas.The Accordance Atlas is an unparalleled exploration into the geography of the world of the Bible. Create the exact map you need for your next lesson or sermon through a series of pre-defined overlays, and even create your own! The Accordance Atlas comes with every level of our Graphics Collections. Double-click on a location and the PhotoGuide Overview will automatically launch to the appropriate article!

And Timeline! Every Graphics Collection also comes with the Accordance Timeline. Not only does the Timeline cover biblical books, people, and events, it puts the biblical world in the context of the ancient world by including coverage of not just Israel/Palestine, but also Egypt, Aram (Syria), Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia (Anatolia), Greece and Rome. Recent updates have improved the overall visual design of the Timeline as well as adding church history events. Can’t find a person or event on the Timeline? It’s customizable, so you can add your own. Double-click on any item in the Accordance Timeline to open the article on that subject in your preferred Accordance dictionary!

Carta Titles. Carta, The Israel Map and Publishing Company, has become synonymous with the geography of the biblical world, both ancient and modern. Available on no other Bible software platform, add eight of our many Carta titles to your Accordance Library with the addition of the Graphics Master Collection.

PhotoMuseum. What the PhotoGuide is to places, the Accordance Bible Times PhotoMuseum is to things. Discover images of artifacts in the Photomuseum not found in any other publication--print or digital! For many of these items, the only other way to see them is to view them for yourself in a museum!

Want to see the exact differences among all four Accordance Graphics Collections? Go to the Collection Comparison Chart in the Accordance Online Store, and select each of the Graphics Collections to see a side-by-side comparison!

In Exodus 20:4, the Israelites were forbidden to make any kind of graven image to depict God. And yet, that doesn’t mean that the Bible is absent of imagery altogether. In fact, the pages of Scripture are filled with imagery from the Tabernacle (and later the Temple) representing God’s presence to the rich visual messages proclaimed by prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. The New Testament follows this precedent with Jesus’ parables that are used to illustrate basic principles of the Kingdom of God. And, of course, John’s Apocalypse is probably the richest biblical source for spectacular visual imagery depicting the cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. And yet, when it comes to the Bible, all of the above is done with words. That is, the words themselves create the pictures in our mind when we read or hear them.

I occasionally hear someone speak critically of the fact that today’s generation has difficulty sitting still simply to listen to a person speak. And while I won’t defend the fact that our attention spans may indeed be far too short these days, I cannot deny that we live in a very visual culture. But I don’t believe today’s fascination with the visual has to be a source of lament; on the contrary, it is something that can not only be celebrated but used in great ways for teaching the Bible.

Orpah in the flesh? No, but this photo was taken in the early part of the 20th century before industrialization changed the way of life in the Holy Land from the way it had been for thousands of years. Click/tap on the image above from Historic Views - American Colony, included in the Graphics Pro Collection.

The first Bible software I ever used (way back in the late 80’s!) came on 5.25" floppy disks and ran on MS-DOS. I was thrilled to be able to search the Bible so quickly (something we still appreciate today in Accordance), but back then Bible software simply meant biblical texts and a handful of reference and public domain works. In other words, just words.

Click/tap image above for a closer look at the Accordance Bible Times PhotoGuide: Egypt, included in the Graphics Pro Collection.

Bible software is very different today, though. These days we still have biblical texts, but we also have the benefit of image-rich titles in the Accordance Library. In fact, we aren’t limited to working from computerized text only. We can also examine manuscript and codex images for ourselves that would have required a trip to a monastery or museum in previous generations.

Taking visual learning into account, for many years I have used presentation graphics software while teaching. In the early days of doing this, I mainly put text on the screen. Images were difficult to find, while text was easily available. But these days, I use less text on screen and aim more for finding the “just right” image. And, of course, the primary tool I use or this is Accordance.

If you already have a solid personal Accordance Library filled with biblical texts and reference works but lack some of the image-based resources available, let me recommend to you our Graphics Pro Collection. This add-on to any regular Accordance Collection also builds on our other Graphics Collections which come with the exclusive Atlas and Timeline that Accordance has been known for all these years. The Graphics Pro Collection adds all six of the recently updated PhotoGuide. Also, take advantage of the Carta Bible Atlas and all the visually-rich titles from Rose Publishing.

Click/tap the image above or a larger view of the new Satellite Bible Atlas, included in all of the Accordance Graphics Collections.

If you’re teaching or preaching about the Christmas or Hanukkah story in the upcoming days, what a great time to add the titles in the Graphics Pro Collection to your personal Accordance Library! Did you know that you can set the Research tab to Image and Graphics tools to search only the image captions in the titles of your Accordance Library? What a great way to find that perfect image to illustrate your point! And remember that when purchasing any Collection from Accordance, you never pay twice for any resource you already own. If you currently have any of the titles in the Graphics Pro Collection, the upgrade may be much less expensive than you realize. Check it out and start including the “just right” biblical image in your next presentation on the Bible!

Did you know thumbnail images in Accordance Mobile can be viewed fullscreen? Even better, you can export them to use in your teaching and preaching materials! This week's Accordance Mobile Minute shows you how!

Bible Lands PhotoGuide 4 NEW

The literature of the Bible is closely tied to its geography. We read about places like Damascus, Jericho, Ephesus, and Jerusalem; but the majority of Bible readers throughout history have not been fortunate enough to travel to these places to see them for themselves. When we read about these places, we form vivid images in our minds, but those images can't compare with the actual locations. Ultimately, seeing for ourselves can really make a difference not only in our understanding of the biblical story, but even in regard to our faith as well.

The Accordance Bible Lands PhotoGuide has been the cornerstone of a number of our exclusive graphics tools for well over a decade. Now we are pleased to announce the fourth edition of the PhotoGuide. With 50 new articles and nearly twice the numbers of photos of the previous edition, the PhotoGuide 4 sets a new standard for experiencing biblical sites from the comfort of your armchair (or desk, or favorite corner coffee shop). It's nearly as close as you can get without traveling to the Holy Land yourself!

The Bible Lands PhotoGuide 4 has hundreds of detailed articles describing the most important Biblical locations in Israel and surrounding countries, illustrated with more than 3000 high-quality photographs. More than just a collection of pictures, the PhotoGuide is specifically designed to be a teaching tool which helps make the Bible come alive. It includes following features:

Graphics Premier Bundle NEW

The Graphics Premier Bundle includes the Accordance Bible Lands PhotoGuide 4, and all the resources below. This bundle supplies many thousands of high-quality images with full searchable documentation. It is designed as the perfect add-on to our very popular Graphics Bundle of Atlas, Timeline, and PhotoGuide 3, which is included in the Essential Collection and up.

Like the PhotoGuide 4, several of these resources are available only in Accordance. The others may be obtained in print or on DVDs, but none are included in other Bible software packages. This entire package is an Accordance exclusive!

With the new Accordance Custom Upgrade method, you will be charged only for the modules you are adding or upgrading, not the ones you already own. Save even more when you purchase the bundle during the current sale.

Check out the video on searching your entire library for a specific images.

Have you noticed that Bible reference books are getting more and more graphically rich? It used to be that even "illustrated" Bible dictionaries only featured a relatively small illustration every twenty pages or so. Today, no doubt prompted by our constant exposure to multiple forms of media, it is rare to see a Bible reference book which does not feature lots of illustrations, charts, tables, and sidebars. In Accordance, we now have lots of graphically rich study Bibles, dictionaries, atlases, and photo collections. In fact, Dr. J recently produced an entire podcast explaining how to purchase and use these resources. If you haven't watched it yet, be sure to check it out.

Now, let's say you purchase one of these graphically-rich modules in Accordance. Once you've installed it, one of the first things you'll want to do is skim through all the images to see which ones really jump out at you. But in a large resource with lots of text—say for example, the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible—scrolling through the entire resource just to see all the pictures would be prohibitively time-consuming. Wouldn't it be nice if you could view only the images and scroll through those?

One obvious way to do this is to click a picture thumbnail to view that image in a large picture window. Then you can click the right and left arrows at the sides of the picture window to view the previous or next image.

The problem with this approach is that you have to click to cycle through each picture, and because the picture window changes to match the size of each image, you likely will need to keep moving the mouse to click the right or left arrow. The problem of the moving arrows can easily be overcome by pressing the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard, but you still have to press a key each time you want to go to the next image.

Here's a trick I use to scroll quickly through all the picture thumbnails of an Accordance tool module:

First, I choose the Captions field in the Tool window search bar, and then I enter ?*. That's a question mark followed by an asterisk, and this combination of search symbols will search for every word in the Captions field.

Now that I've done my search, I can tell Accordance to show me only those paragraphs which contain a search hit, effectively hiding all the other information in the tool. To do this, I simply choose Paragraphs from the Show Text As submenu of the tool's Gear menu.

Voila! My tool window now shows only the captioned images in the tool, and I can simply scroll to skim all of these thumbnails.

I use this trick whenever I'm doing final checks on a tool module prior to its release, but it works just as well for those of you who want to look at all the pictures in your latest Graphics Tool purchase.

Last month, I began a series of posts on getting information from Accordance into a Keynote presentation. In part 1 of that series, I surveyed some of the resources I've been using most often in my development of a Keynote presentation for teaching Sunday School. Among the resources I highlighted were resources with lots of great visuals like the Carta books which are currently on sale. Now that we've released several titles from Rose Publishing, I'm now using those books as well.

In part 2 of that series, I showed you how to get formatted text from Accordance into Keynote using Copy As Citation in Accordance and Paste and Match Style in Keynote.

In today's post, I want to show you the easy way to get images from Accordance into Keynote.

First, let's look at how to find the right image for your Keynote presentation. Quite often, I'll just go looking in the Accordance Tool module I think is likely to have the image I want. For example, if I'm looking for a classic artistic depiction of a Bible story, I'll just open up Bible Art and turn to the passage in question. If I want an image of a Biblical place, I'll turn to PhotoGuide, or perhaps the American Colony collection. Browsing for images in the most likely places is slower than doing a library-wide search, but sometimes it leads me to stumble across images I hadn't thought to use. So never underestimate the value of browsing—provided, of course, you have the time for it.

When I'm in a hurry, I typically will enter a search term in the Search All field of the Workspace toolbar. By clicking on the magnifying glass at the left of the search field, I can choose to search by Image and confine my search to [All Tools], [Graphics Tools], or any custom group I happen to create. Because simple key word searches are usually lightning fast, I typically search [All Tools].

Right now, I'm teaching through Genesis 3, and I want to find an artistic depiction of Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. If I enter "expel" and hit return, Accordance searches all my tools for any image with some form of the word "expel" in the caption. This returns some results, but when I click on each module in the left panel to see the results in the panel on the right, I find that none of these has the image I want. Changing my search to "expulsion" finds even more results, and after scanning through each module I find two artistic depictions of the expulsion from Eden: one in Bible Art and the other in the Rose Guide to the Temple.

I decide I want to use the depiction by Gustave Doré in Bible Art. To use it, I can simply click the thumbnail in the preview pane of the Search All tab. This will open a Picture window and I can simply choose Copy Picture from the Edit menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-C) to copy the picture at its full resolution. In Keynote, I would then simply select an image on a picture slide and choose Paste from the Edit menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-V). This will replace the image I selected with the image I had copied from Accordance.

Another easy way to copy images from Accordance to Keynote is to drag an image thumbnail directly from Accordance onto an image drop zone in Keynote. Unfortunately, this can only be done from a Tool tab; not from the preview panel of the Search All tab. So in this case, where I've used the Search All tab to find an image, I have to take the intermediate step of opening Bible Art in a tab of its own. This is easily done by double-clicking the name Bible Art in the left panel of the Search All tab.

Now I can simply drag the thumbnail in the Bible Art tab over to Keynote and drop it on one of those image drop zones. This will copy the full-size image to Keynote and size it to fit the drop zone.

By using either of these methods, I can very quickly assemble a series of slides with great-looking visuals.

Accordance offers tremendous advantages over other Bible programs—speed, flexibility, powerful features and valuable resources found nowhere else. Yet sometimes, in focusing on those big advantages, we lose sight of the many smaller advantages we all tend to take for granted. Recently, a reviewer was evaluating Accordance and pointed out an advantage that hadn't really occurred to us: the ability to drag and drop text and images.

As this reviewer was working with Accordance, he arranged his screen so that Accordance was side-by-side with the word processor he uses to compose his sermons. When he wanted to copy text out of Accordance, he simply selected it, then dragged it and dropped it onto his word processor. It's the kind of functionality Mac users don't even think about, so to us it seemed like no big deal. Yet surprisingly, this simple action is simply not possible with some other Mac Bible programs.

This reviewer didn't mention images, but you can also drag image thumbnails from an Accordance tool window to copy the full-size image into another program. For example, if you're putting together a bulletin in Pages or a slide show in Keynote, you can drag the thumbnail from Accordance onto an image placeholder in the other program.

Doing so will copy the image to that placeholder, keeping any borders or custom formatting which were applied to that placeholder.

Again, this simple functionality makes getting images out of Accordance incredibly easy, and apparently, it's not something to be taken for granted!

You don't search Accordance tools by words and verses, but by the various fields of content each tool contains (Titles, Content, Scripture, etc.). Entering an asterisk in the search entry box, regardless of which field is selected, will always display the entire contents of the tool. This is analogous to the asterisk in a Bible window when Verses is selected.

There may be times, however, when you actually want to search for every word in a particular search field. If the asterisk by itself always displays the entire text without actually searching for every word, how would you search for every word in a field? An easy way to do it is to search for a question mark followed by an asterisk, like this: ?*. The question mark is a wildcard symbol which represents any single character, and the asterisk is a wildcard symbol which represents any combination of characters. Entering the two together in a tool window makes it clear that you want to find and highlight every word in the currently selected field.

Why would you want to highlight every word in a given field? Here's one useful example. Let's say you've taken advantage of our current dictionary sale (which ends next week) to pick up the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible. One of the selling points of this five-volume reference is its many high-quality photographs and illustrations. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search for all those images so you can quickly scroll through them, just to get an idea of the kinds of illustrations you now have access to?

To do this, open the ZEB and select Captions in the field pop-up menu. Now enter ?* and hit return. Accordance will search for every word in the captions field, effectively finding every image. You can then use the Mark buttons to jump from image to image.

Now, here's the cool trick. Select Paragraphs from the Show pop-up menu to see only those paragraphs of the ZEB which contain a search hit. This effectively hides everything but the images and their captions, enabling you to scroll through the entire tool to see the kinds of images it contains. Set the image size to Large (by choosing Set Tool Display from the Display menu), and you'll get a result which looks like this:

Last month, I linked to a post by Rick Mansfield entitled Balaam in the Flesh. In that post, Rick showed how he used Accordance to find an image that would illustrate the story of Balaam for a Bible study he teaches.

Rick recently followed up that post with a video demonstrating how he uses Accordance, other Bible software, and (as a last resort) Google to find those kinds of visual aids and incorporate them into his Keynote presentations. Be sure to check it out.

Do you find yourself producing more visuals than usual during Advent? Is your church producing slide presentations, bulletins, flyers advertising a Christmas program, and the like? Are you sending out Christmas cards and letters? Do you ever find yourself looking for unique Christmas images to include in all these documents and presentations?

You can do a Google image search and find some nice images, but it can be a lot of work separating the wheat from the chaff. When you do manage to find the perfect image, it is often too small and low-resolution to be usable.

For that reason, I have long relied on Accordance resources like Bible Art for high-quality Christmas images. If you were to look back at my family Christmas letters over the past several years, you would see them adorned with quite a few images from that one module. Last year we added the Christmas Classics module with some additional Christmas images. And of course, an image search of your entire Accordance library can turn up additional images in unexpected places.

One relatively new resource which I plan to mine for images in upcoming years is Historic Views of the Holy Land: The American Colony and Eric Matson Collection. This massive collection of photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers views of Israel that you just don't see today, and many of those photographs actually reenact biblical scenes. For example, a simple search for Bethlehem turned up the following images reminiscent of the shepherds:

…and the magi:

…and the birth of Jesus:

How cool are those? There are many more images which illustrate the Christmas story, and countless others which illustrate other biblical narratives. It's really an incredible resource.